"Hello? HELLO? I'm on the plane. I'm ON THE PLANE. Hello? Hello? Hello? I'm on the plane. I'm on the plane. HELLO? Wyoming. I'm on the plane. I'M ON THE PLANE. Hello? Hello? I'm - Hello? I'm on the plane. Wyoming. I'm over Wyoming. Hello?"
Slight modification of a conversation I actually heard on the bus.
Honestly, after being one seat away from that person, I was willing to ban all cell-phones flatout - and that was only a fifteen-minute ride!
In all seriousness, mp3 players have no need to play sound that loudly unless you turn the volume really high manually (in which case it's your own fault). Cellphones aren't the same way, because they also need to ring. It's not quite comparable.
Yeah! Instead of paying utility bills, we just have to pay maintenance and replacement costs for the solar power cells, the water recyclers and cleaners, and the air filters. Plus we have to pay out the nose to buy the equipment in the first place.
Yes, there is. It's equally mesmerizing - I've sat there and watched it for a few hours. Funny searches:
paris hilton (no less than seven times) UTOPIA (you're not gonna find it if you can't fix your capslock) www.google.com (found it!) net (I can only wonder what they were searching for) BIG BROTHER (no, no we're not watching you) . . . and at least two or three phone numbers, which I was very tempted to call.
"Hi! Who is this? Did you know someone's searching for you on Google?"
Yes. Does this surprise you? I don't remember anyone saying that wasn't a factor - it just hasn't been particularly important until lately, since there were no operating systems that fell under the category of "not popular now, but obviously popular in the future".
Any software developer should expect to "lose" a large percentage of "imaginary" revenue from piracy. I only know one person who wrote a shareware utility that was never pirated - and it was never pirated because nobody ever bought the full version.
If you bothered to read what I said, you'd discover that, yes, I downloaded the demo first. I wanted to play multiplayer with my friends, and the demo doesn't provide most of the game modes.
Piracy protection shouldn't be game type specific because it's flawed to begin with, so there you go. MMORPGs are immune, other games aren't (I just came from a LAN party where we played UT2K4, copied over the LAN. On the other hand, at least half of us ordered it online *at the LAN party* so we could have legal copies to play online later.)
No, publically admitting I'm cracking Gish because you're a little child doesn't solve the problem. Which is unfortunate. I wish the problem was solved, but the makers of Gish don't see it the same way I do. So I solve my local problem, and try to inform people that it is, in fact, a problem, in the hopes they won't make the same mistake.
Incidentally, I'm a professional game designer - although right now I'm taking a break from game design to work at a multi-thousand-employee company and make a lot of money, then make my own game company. I'd give you company names except I have no reason to. So I won't.:)
There's a game called Gish. I played the demo. I loved it. I bought it and installed it. And still loved it!
So I brought it to a friend's house, and installed it there, and we played it, and she said "this game rocks!". And before I left I erased it. She said she'd probably buy it.
So I brought it to another friend's house, a few days later! Or I tried to. Because, see, I'd just been downloading it off their website, but their website locked me out because I'd downloaded it too many times. So I emailed them, and they said yes, they'd unlock it so I could download it again, but I was only allowed to install it three times. The verification system wouldn't let me install it more than that.
What the hell? They hadn't mentioned this before. Like, you know. When I paid them money for it.
So I complained, and they refused to do anything. It's to protect against piracy! It's for everyone's better good! If you need to install it more than three times, why not just buy another copy? It's not that expensive!
I'd been planning to install it on my second computer so I could play around with it when my main computer was doing computationally intensive stuff.
I'd been planning to reformat and rebuild my main computer in half a year or so, and obviously that would require reinstalling as well.
Three installs? What the hell? I paid good money for this game. I BOUGHT this game. Why am I being treated like a criminal?
Well, make the crime fit the punishment, I guess. I downloaded the crack. It took about a tenth as long as it had taken to argue with them about copy protection.
I installed it on my friend's computer. We played it. I didn't bother deleting it. He said he'd probably have bought it if it wasn't for that 3-install limit (he reformats often.)
I called up my first friend and told her the bad news. She thanked me for the warning, and said she'd changed her mind on buying it.
I now have the crack stored on a server of mine so I can install it wherever I want.
That sure helped them defend against piracy, didn't it?
If you want people to buy your software, there's one and only one way to do it. You can't force them. You can't tell them they must. You simply make them want to. This, however, doesn't make me want to - and therefore it's a failure. Any software developer who thinks they can get around this is living in a state of denial. Accept piracy - and embrace piracy, because it can be a fantastic word-of-mouth network. One percent of a million users is a hell of a lot more sales than one hundred percent of a thousand users.
I remember my first sight of the weird creepy flesh level geometry in the base. Was it just me, or did those look *exactly* like the weird creepy flesh level geometry in Alice?
"Our roots are in the horror/action genre," he said over lunch at QuakeCon, the ongoing annual fan event for fans of id's games. "That suits our tastes and talents. We're thinking about something up that alley.... [That said], we're keeping the idea vault open. 'Quake' and 'Doom' were both basically a sci-fi game. 'Wolfenstein' was a World War II game. I'd like to try something new."
. . . So, let's see. They've done sci-fi, with demons, in the dark. And they've done roughly present-day, with demons, in the dark.
I was thinking of posting something like this, but decided not to. But you did it for me! Thanks.:)
It always bugs me when people put down things they couldn't do. I mean, I could play baseball professionally, right? You just hit the ball. It's not that hard.
"British Gas was cited as the Most Invasive Company, after it declared that U.K. privacy rules prevented it from helping an elderly couple who were found dead of hypothermia in their home last winter, weeks after their gas service was cut off due to nonpayment of a 140-pound ($255) bill."
How is this invasive? It sounds like the exact opposite. I'll admit it's a bit obsessive, but behavior like this is exactly what privacy is all about.
Turn it around - would it be better if British Gas had notified all the welfare groups when the bill didn't arrive? "Hello, welfare groups! These people might be poor! Sic 'em!" Isn't this just a step away from notifying alcoholics-anonymous and drug rehab clinics whenever they see evidence of beer or pot?
I have to admit, I really don't see what British Gas could have done here better, aside from keep providing gas despite these people not paying.
Now, "most unfeeling", sure, I'll buy that. But this is about as far from invasive as it gets.
There's also a *lack* of distinction that needs to be emphasized.
All else being equal, musical artists and programmer artists have the exact same goals - stay alive and get their work out to as many appreciative people as possible.
It just happens that the handy method music people have of making a living plain doesn't work for coders, which sucks.
(I just had a mental image of live stadium programming. With an announcer, of course. "It looks like he's using polymorphism! Oh no, he's misspelled 'class'. Wait, what's he doing? Yes, folks, he's SCRATCHING HIS BALLS")
I work in games. I, personally, would LOVE to be able to make games, distribute them utterly free of charge, and have people play them. That would probably be the best thing that could possibly happen to be.
But I have this weird addiction to food, and having a place to sleep.:)
Plus, if I have more money to put into a game, I can make a better game. Personally I've played enough one-person amateur unplayable games - I'd rather like to have ten or fifteen people to work on it.
Plus, if I can have an advertising budget, more people will play my game. That's good! I like this.
Unfortunately, both of those things cost money. I wish they didn't, but they do. So I'd like people to buy my games legally.
On the other hand, I'm not really obsessed about it. If someone wants to pirate my games they're going to, and there's not a whole lot I can do to stop it. So I'm fine with enough copy protection to dissuade casual piracy and just rely on people's desire to give me money for the rest.
On the other hand, I knew someone who, whenever asked for help, would proceed to dumb it down to the point of idiocy. "Now click the little dialog box. Good! Now see that icon? Click that icon!"
Nobody asked him for help either because they didn't like being treated like children.
When people ask me for help, I assume a certain level of competency involving knowledge of double-clicking and basic computer skills. I form questions in a way that isn't offensive but doesn't assume things either, and regear my process based on the answers.
For example, I might ask "Have you cleaned your cache recently?". An average (to me:P) user might say "No, I haven't", or, on a particularly good day, "No, but that's a good idea." A below-average user might say "What's a cache?" or "How do I do that?", in which case I know I have to walk them through.
Of course, an advanced user might say "Yes, but that didn't fix the problem." A really advanced user might say "Yes, and I checked the directory to make sure it was really deleted."
I love that word "can" - there's so many ways to interpret it that people just plain don't get offended.:)
I forget what the browser distribution back then was, but if you did the same thing now and I happened to run across it with each browser (I use both), my responses would be respectively:
"Blocking IE? Oh, great, it's another of those 'IE sucks and I hate it therefore I won't let anyone visit my site because I am elitist' people. Screw that, I've got better things to do."
"Blocking Firefox? Maybe they don't realize what the market share is like. I should email him and let him know."
Obviously, in each case, I'd end up writing vastly different kinds of email (well, in the first case I wouldn't write email at all, but hey.) Just categorizing it on "browser type" really doesn't tell you much.
(And I've run into both kinds of site in the last month, which is why I know those would be my reactions.:) )
See, there's my point. There's a simple source of high-quality non-DRM music files. Sure, they're not legal, but that doesn't matter so much.
DVDs got cracked because they were the best quality by far and there was no other source. WMA isn't, and there is. Expect it to be cracked as soon as it's the best thing around.
That's because nobody cares. Quick, guess how many DRM'ed WMA files I have! Yep. Zero. I don't even know where you *get* DRM'ed WMA files, unless Windows Media Player will rip them from CDs for you (and if you're ripping from CDs, why not just use a good CD ripping program and encode non-DRM WMAs?)
Trust me, as soon as we have more than a dozen sources of DRM WMA that don't have trivial non-DRM WMA sources attached, we'll have cracks.
Slashdot Mirror
"Hello? HELLO? I'm on the plane. I'm ON THE PLANE. Hello? Hello? Hello? I'm on the plane. I'm on the plane. HELLO? Wyoming. I'm on the plane. I'M ON THE PLANE. Hello? Hello? I'm - Hello? I'm on the plane. Wyoming. I'm over Wyoming. Hello?"
Slight modification of a conversation I actually heard on the bus.
Honestly, after being one seat away from that person, I was willing to ban all cell-phones flatout - and that was only a fifteen-minute ride!
Depends on the MMORPG. FFXI has so many money sinks (and so few ways to make money quickly+conveniently) that cash stays reasonably valuable.
In all seriousness, mp3 players have no need to play sound that loudly unless you turn the volume really high manually (in which case it's your own fault). Cellphones aren't the same way, because they also need to ring. It's not quite comparable.
Yeah! Instead of paying utility bills, we just have to pay maintenance and replacement costs for the solar power cells, the water recyclers and cleaners, and the air filters. Plus we have to pay out the nose to buy the equipment in the first place.
Sounds like a great deal!
Yes, there is. It's equally mesmerizing - I've sat there and watched it for a few hours. Funny searches:
paris hilton (no less than seven times)
UTOPIA (you're not gonna find it if you can't fix your capslock)
www.google.com (found it!)
net (I can only wonder what they were searching for)
BIG BROTHER (no, no we're not watching you)
. . . and at least two or three phone numbers, which I was very tempted to call.
"Hi! Who is this? Did you know someone's searching for you on Google?"
Yes. Does this surprise you? I don't remember anyone saying that wasn't a factor - it just hasn't been particularly important until lately, since there were no operating systems that fell under the category of "not popular now, but obviously popular in the future".
You're an idiot. :P
:)
Any software developer should expect to "lose" a large percentage of "imaginary" revenue from piracy. I only know one person who wrote a shareware utility that was never pirated - and it was never pirated because nobody ever bought the full version.
If you bothered to read what I said, you'd discover that, yes, I downloaded the demo first. I wanted to play multiplayer with my friends, and the demo doesn't provide most of the game modes.
Piracy protection shouldn't be game type specific because it's flawed to begin with, so there you go. MMORPGs are immune, other games aren't (I just came from a LAN party where we played UT2K4, copied over the LAN. On the other hand, at least half of us ordered it online *at the LAN party* so we could have legal copies to play online later.)
No, publically admitting I'm cracking Gish because you're a little child doesn't solve the problem. Which is unfortunate. I wish the problem was solved, but the makers of Gish don't see it the same way I do. So I solve my local problem, and try to inform people that it is, in fact, a problem, in the hopes they won't make the same mistake.
Incidentally, I'm a professional game designer - although right now I'm taking a break from game design to work at a multi-thousand-employee company and make a lot of money, then make my own game company. I'd give you company names except I have no reason to. So I won't.
. . . and I feel their pain . . .
. . . but I still don't agree.
There's a game called Gish. I played the demo. I loved it. I bought it and installed it. And still loved it!
So I brought it to a friend's house, and installed it there, and we played it, and she said "this game rocks!". And before I left I erased it. She said she'd probably buy it.
So I brought it to another friend's house, a few days later! Or I tried to. Because, see, I'd just been downloading it off their website, but their website locked me out because I'd downloaded it too many times. So I emailed them, and they said yes, they'd unlock it so I could download it again, but I was only allowed to install it three times. The verification system wouldn't let me install it more than that.
What the hell? They hadn't mentioned this before. Like, you know. When I paid them money for it.
So I complained, and they refused to do anything. It's to protect against piracy! It's for everyone's better good! If you need to install it more than three times, why not just buy another copy? It's not that expensive!
I'd been planning to install it on my second computer so I could play around with it when my main computer was doing computationally intensive stuff.
I'd been planning to reformat and rebuild my main computer in half a year or so, and obviously that would require reinstalling as well.
Three installs? What the hell? I paid good money for this game. I BOUGHT this game. Why am I being treated like a criminal?
Well, make the crime fit the punishment, I guess. I downloaded the crack. It took about a tenth as long as it had taken to argue with them about copy protection.
I installed it on my friend's computer. We played it. I didn't bother deleting it. He said he'd probably have bought it if it wasn't for that 3-install limit (he reformats often.)
I called up my first friend and told her the bad news. She thanked me for the warning, and said she'd changed her mind on buying it.
I now have the crack stored on a server of mine so I can install it wherever I want.
That sure helped them defend against piracy, didn't it?
If you want people to buy your software, there's one and only one way to do it. You can't force them. You can't tell them they must. You simply make them want to. This, however, doesn't make me want to - and therefore it's a failure. Any software developer who thinks they can get around this is living in a state of denial. Accept piracy - and embrace piracy, because it can be a fantastic word-of-mouth network. One percent of a million users is a hell of a lot more sales than one hundred percent of a thousand users.
SUPER TURBO BARNEY CLUBBER 3
I remember my first sight of the weird creepy flesh level geometry in the base. Was it just me, or did those look *exactly* like the weird creepy flesh level geometry in Alice?
I agree entirely. Unfortunately, in America at least, I seriously doubt it's ever going to happen.
Imagine telling someone that they have to be competent to drive a large vehicle - you'd be laughed right out of office!
(I wish I was joking.)
"Our roots are in the horror/action genre," he said over lunch at QuakeCon, the ongoing annual fan event for fans of id's games. "That suits our tastes and talents. We're thinking about something up that alley. ... [That said], we're keeping the idea vault open. 'Quake' and 'Doom' were both basically a sci-fi game. 'Wolfenstein' was a World War II game. I'd like to try something new."
. . . So, let's see. They've done sci-fi, with demons, in the dark. And they've done roughly present-day, with demons, in the dark.
My theory:
Fantasy!
With demons.
In the dark.
I was thinking of posting something like this, but decided not to. But you did it for me! Thanks. :)
It always bugs me when people put down things they couldn't do. I mean, I could play baseball professionally, right? You just hit the ball. It's not that hard.
-ZorbaTHut, ranked #5 in the world on Topcoder
I'm not sure I understand why the movie studios would have a problem with this.
:P
Because they're not making money off it.
If you think the MPAA wouldn't charge for private parties if they thought they could get away with it, you're deluding yourself.
"British Gas was cited as the Most Invasive Company, after it declared that U.K. privacy rules prevented it from helping an elderly couple who were found dead of hypothermia in their home last winter, weeks after their gas service was cut off due to nonpayment of a 140-pound ($255) bill."
How is this invasive? It sounds like the exact opposite. I'll admit it's a bit obsessive, but behavior like this is exactly what privacy is all about.
Turn it around - would it be better if British Gas had notified all the welfare groups when the bill didn't arrive? "Hello, welfare groups! These people might be poor! Sic 'em!" Isn't this just a step away from notifying alcoholics-anonymous and drug rehab clinics whenever they see evidence of beer or pot?
I have to admit, I really don't see what British Gas could have done here better, aside from keep providing gas despite these people not paying.
Now, "most unfeeling", sure, I'll buy that. But this is about as far from invasive as it gets.
"We've discounted confluences in the oceans and some near the poles"
Sissies.
There's also a *lack* of distinction that needs to be emphasized.
All else being equal, musical artists and programmer artists have the exact same goals - stay alive and get their work out to as many appreciative people as possible.
It just happens that the handy method music people have of making a living plain doesn't work for coders, which sucks.
(I just had a mental image of live stadium programming. With an announcer, of course. "It looks like he's using polymorphism! Oh no, he's misspelled 'class'. Wait, what's he doing? Yes, folks, he's SCRATCHING HIS BALLS")
Agreed, sort of.
:)
I work in games. I, personally, would LOVE to be able to make games, distribute them utterly free of charge, and have people play them. That would probably be the best thing that could possibly happen to be.
But I have this weird addiction to food, and having a place to sleep.
Plus, if I have more money to put into a game, I can make a better game. Personally I've played enough one-person amateur unplayable games - I'd rather like to have ten or fifteen people to work on it.
Plus, if I can have an advertising budget, more people will play my game. That's good! I like this.
Unfortunately, both of those things cost money. I wish they didn't, but they do. So I'd like people to buy my games legally.
On the other hand, I'm not really obsessed about it. If someone wants to pirate my games they're going to, and there's not a whole lot I can do to stop it. So I'm fine with enough copy protection to dissuade casual piracy and just rely on people's desire to give me money for the rest.
On the other hand, I knew someone who, whenever asked for help, would proceed to dumb it down to the point of idiocy. "Now click the little dialog box. Good! Now see that icon? Click that icon!"
:P) user might say "No, I haven't", or, on a particularly good day, "No, but that's a good idea." A below-average user might say "What's a cache?" or "How do I do that?", in which case I know I have to walk them through.
:)
Nobody asked him for help either because they didn't like being treated like children.
When people ask me for help, I assume a certain level of competency involving knowledge of double-clicking and basic computer skills. I form questions in a way that isn't offensive but doesn't assume things either, and regear my process based on the answers.
For example, I might ask "Have you cleaned your cache recently?". An average (to me
Of course, an advanced user might say "Yes, but that didn't fix the problem." A really advanced user might say "Yes, and I checked the directory to make sure it was really deleted."
I love that word "can" - there's so many ways to interpret it that people just plain don't get offended.
I forget what the browser distribution back then was, but if you did the same thing now and I happened to run across it with each browser (I use both), my responses would be respectively:
:) )
"Blocking IE? Oh, great, it's another of those 'IE sucks and I hate it therefore I won't let anyone visit my site because I am elitist' people. Screw that, I've got better things to do."
"Blocking Firefox? Maybe they don't realize what the market share is like. I should email him and let him know."
Obviously, in each case, I'd end up writing vastly different kinds of email (well, in the first case I wouldn't write email at all, but hey.) Just categorizing it on "browser type" really doesn't tell you much.
(And I've run into both kinds of site in the last month, which is why I know those would be my reactions.
And who here is surprised that people who would commit violence will also play video games?
Wait, which one was supposed to be the causation? Or is there causation at all? Perhaps it's just correlation?
Please be a little more specific with regards to "linking". Vague comments don't help anyone.
See, there's my point. There's a simple source of high-quality non-DRM music files. Sure, they're not legal, but that doesn't matter so much.
DVDs got cracked because they were the best quality by far and there was no other source. WMA isn't, and there is. Expect it to be cracked as soon as it's the best thing around.
That's because nobody cares. Quick, guess how many DRM'ed WMA files I have! Yep. Zero. I don't even know where you *get* DRM'ed WMA files, unless Windows Media Player will rip them from CDs for you (and if you're ripping from CDs, why not just use a good CD ripping program and encode non-DRM WMAs?)
Trust me, as soon as we have more than a dozen sources of DRM WMA that don't have trivial non-DRM WMA sources attached, we'll have cracks.
I wonder if Newegg's sales just spiked.
I suppose - except (1) the server is extremely low on RAM, and I've never seen a JRE that isn't a RAM hog, and (2) I don't particularly like Java.